Collection Highlights

The extraordinary collection of the  Eileen J. Garrett Parapsychology Foundation Collection comprises some 12,000 items, covering not only psychical research but, as they relate to the field, volumes on psychology, anthropology, medicine, sociology, philosophy, religion, quantum physics — the list goes on.

Where else would one find in the same room, rare nineteenth-century editions penned by Spiritist Allan Kardec and “harmonial philosopher” Andrew Jackson Davis next to books by Uri Geller and James Randi; The Collected Scientific Papers of Wolfgang Pauli next to Dr. Daniel Benor’s exhaustive two-volume bibliography on healing research, Holistic Energy Medicine and Spirituality; such strictly academic fare as Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences next to a history of ghosts and poltergeists by Father Howard Thurston, a Jesuit priest; Dr. J. B. Rhine’s New Frontiers of the Mind in which the “father of parapsychology” recounts the history of his experiments at Duke University from the late 1920s to the late 1930s, next to a paperback copy of Alan Sokol and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science or Michael White’s Weird Science?

The collection at the library is laudably even-handed (there are volumes for the “skeptic” as well as for the sympathetic inquirer) — and up-to-the-minute too! An extraordinary collection of magazines, journals and audio-visual materials are also included. Although the bulk of the library’s collection is in English, there are a significant number of books in other languages as well, among them some of the most important non-English texts in the field.

An often times much appreciated perk of utilizing the library are the many bibliographies on specific topics prepared by the late Dr. Carlos S. Alvarado, a noted researcher and historian of parapsychology who was also a Research Fellow with the Foundation.